CS 373 Fall 2021: Blog 2

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I got an email that someone in one of my classes tested positive for Covid-19 in the first week of class, so the professor of that class went to hybrid for the rest of the week. That was probably the worst class to have that happen in due to the fact that the class was packed tightly with nearly 60 students. However, since I am commuting from one hour away, I decided to just not go to class and just watch the lectures online, which is good for me but bad for others. I hope no one gets sick from this. I also got a Covid test and tested negative. In terms of work that I did, I mostly just did readings for a music class that I am taking. In my other CS course, we have not really started any assignments, and I have just been reading my textbook in my Japanese course. For this class, I set up the code repository on Gitlab with issues.

What’s in your way?

My courses are starting to have their first real assignments and projects that I have yet to complete. I will start working on them soon.

What will you do next week?

In the next week, I am going to work hard to complete the assignments that are starting up as the semester has its true start. This Collatz project should not be too difficult for me since I pretty much did it in a past course with Professor Downing.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #2: Makefile?

This paper was very familiar to me since I had Professor Downing over the summer and since he structured this class in a similar way to my previous course. The Makefile used as a paper for this week was fairly similar to the one for C++, but the stark difference is that the unit testing framework does not require a separate tool from just using Python. The C++ makefile required additional flags for unit tests since unit tests came from an external tool, but Python does not. This slightly makes the Python makefile simpler.

What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, and coverage? (this question will vary, week to week)

I had seen and used assertions in my previous course with Professor Downing, so they were quite familiar. I still remember the takeaway he gave in my previous course that he gave this week of where they are effective and where they are not. As for unit tests, I still enjoy them since they are simple to write and, when combined with coverage, act as my favorite tool for testing code. I wish that our introductory CS courses, that were in Java, introduced and made us use JUnit so that we would have had a better way of thoroughly testing code.

What made you happy this week?

I learned that I am getting an emergency fund of $1000, which makes me happy, but also sad since I see that if other students got it, and were renting, it would not put a dent in the cost of rent in Austin right now. I am probably going to use it for a new laptop since my current one is working poorly. Excess will probably go into commuting.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

This week is a bit darker than other weeks. I was looking into a website that gives misinformation and has been known to be getting banned by sites like Facebook. This website is naturalnews.com. Looking at not the best source of information on the internet, Wikipedia, I learned that the company used content farms to “boost its popularity” on Facebook. I had always heard about the phrase content farm and had a definition in my head on what it was. Nevertheless, I looked up what a content farm is. A content farm is what happens when a large website spams low effort content to the internet in order to manipulate search engines like Google by containing keywords in the spammed content. It is so great that the Internet connects people together, but at the same time, it is so horrible that the Internet connects people together.